The Tiger_ A True Story of Vengeance and Survival ( PDFDrive )

desperation, but also extraordinary presence of mind: Markov died while
trying to fit a small, slippery shotgun shell into a narrow gun barrel, in
the dark, at thirty below zero—with a tiger bearing down on him from ten
yards away.

Today, only the tiger remains. When Vladimir Schetinin returned to
Vladivostok after the hunt, he delivered the tiger’s skin to the Arseniev
Museum, which occupies a historic building downtown, on Aleutskaya.
There, the tiger has been stuffed and put on display for all to see. Safely
contained in a glass case, it has been caught forever, out of its element
and visible to all.

Yuri Trush hoped, at the very least, that these events could serve as a kind
of cautionary tale to deter careless hunters and would-be poachers; if
laws and warnings failed, he reasoned, maybe graphic images would get
the point across. “During the investigation, I sent video footage of
Khomenko, Markov, and Pochepnya to the local TV station,” he said.
“They aired it, and there was a lot of negative feedback. People called
saying, ‘Why are you broadcasting such horrors?’ They thought it was
some kind of video montage; they didn’t understand that the footage was
real. In my opinion, people who hunt—who have guns—really needed to
see those images. They have to think about things like that.”

There seems to be no question that, in Primorye, human-tiger relations
have entered a new era in which the potential for scenarios like Markov’s
is increasing. Vasily Solkin attributes this to four factors: a simultaneous
increase in the availability of powerful hunting rifles, Japanese four-
wheel-drive vehicles, and access via logging roads, combined with a
breakdown in traditional hunting values. “The biggest problem for a tiger
these days,” Solkin explained, “is the New Russians who buy good
foreign guns with good optical devices, who trample on hunting rules,
written or traditional, and who hunt without leaving their jeeps, firing at
any animal without even bothering to check whether they killed it or not.

Those people bring the most harm to tigers. The situation today is very
different from the situation ten years ago because, if I encounter a tiger in
the taiga these days, I am encountering an injured tiger more often than
not.”

According to Galina Salkina, a tiger researcher at the Lazovski
Zapovednik and one of only two women working full-time in the
testosterone-heavy world of Amur tiger research, about 80 percent of the
tigers she autopsies have been shot at some point in their lives, many of
them more than once. Sometimes, these situations end like this one did:
In May of 2004, three poachers negotiated access to a restricted border
zone in a tanklike GTS. Because they were hunting at night with lights,
the hunters were aiming at eye-shine alone without being sure what they
were shooting at. One of the men managed to hit a tiger, which then
charged the massive vehicle, jumped aboard, and fatally mauled one of
the hunters before his partners killed it. The crime was discovered, but
the commanding officer in charge of the border area refused access to
investigators. In cases where the tiger survives, it may hold the memory
in mind, and retaliate against the next vehicle or person who fits that
sensory profile.

There have been no attacks on humans reported in the Bikin valley since
1997, but there is conclusive evidence that tigers are being poached there
—by Russians and natives alike. In spite of this, tigers remain a relatively
common sight, and the age-old tensions between them and the pastoralist
Russians with whom they share the taiga persist, exacerbated by
diminishing game populations and loss of habitat to logging. The range of
attitudes seems directly related to personal experience: Sergei Boyko,
who clearly respects his local tigers, has almost lost his patience with
them. At the bridge maintenance camp where he works, five of the six
dogs they kept there were killed by tigers during the winter of 2007–
2008. “I am sick and tired of them,” he said bitterly. “They don’t leave

me alone. I had made arrangements to get a horse, but then had a change
of heart: I can’t get a horse because it will get eaten. I can’t raise a pig
because it will get killed. My neighbor brought a horse to his apiary, and
a tiger killed it.”

Never a fan of tigers to begin with, Sasha Dvornik was seriously
traumatized by the Markov incident. “I’m probably too sensitive,” he told
Sasha Snow, “but I still have nightmares in which I’m collecting pieces
of Markov’s body. If I’d known what I would see there, I’d never have
gone to his cabin. Now, I won’t let a tiger get away alive. I will
exterminate that vermin everywhere.”

The huntress Baba Liuda’s feelings are more philosophical: “If they
want to walk around, let ’em walk around. If they want to roar, the hell
with ’em—let ’em do it.”

Long after the paperwork was completed, this incident continued to haunt
Yuri Trush, and it does so to this day. Although he managed to survive,
Trush has been scarred in a variety of ways: “The native people tell me
that I’m now marked by the tiger,” he said. “Some of them won’t allow
me to sleep with them under the same roof.”

The notion that Trush now bears some ineffable taint, discernible only
to tigers, was put to the test at the tiger catcher Vladimir Kruglov’s
wildlife rehabilitation center in 2004. Trush had gone there with Sasha
Snow in order to get some live footage of a tiger in a forest environment.
One of Kruglov’s rescued tigers, a particularly impressive male, is named
Liuty, which is an efficient word combining vicious, ferocious, cold-
blooded, and bold. It is a good descriptor for Ivan the Terrible, but it
seemed an odd name for this tiger, which was leaning against the
compound fence, getting his neck scratched by Kruglov, who had raised
him from a cub. Kruglov then stepped away to attend to something else,
leaving Trush, Snow, and a few other visitors spread out along the fence,
watching and taking pictures. Liuty, who was used to this kind of

attention, appeared content and relaxed until he spotted Trush, at which
point his demeanor changed suddenly. Liuty fixed his eyes on him and
then, with no warning or apparent motive, he growled, accelerated to a
run, and leaped at the fence as if trying to clear it. It was too high, and
five hundred pounds of tiger piled into the wire, striking it with so much
force that the fence bowed outward ominously, directly in front of Trush.
Trush recoiled and fell over backward as if he had been knocked down
solely by the projected energy of the tiger. Snow was nearby and went to
help him up. “His face was ashen,” he recalled.

Remembering the incident, Trush touched his chest and said, “I felt
cold in here.”

There was no obvious explanation for why this well-fed, well-
socialized tiger would do this, or why it would have picked Trush out of a
group. “Maybe some sort of a bio field exists,” Trush suggested
afterward. “Maybe tigers can feel some connection through the cosmos,
or have some common language. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

Such an interpretation would not have surprised anyone in the Dunkai
or Pionka clans, and it is one of the principal reasons those who maintain
traditional beliefs avoid tigers. Lubovna Passar, a fifty-year-old Nanai
psychologist who uses a combination of shamanic practice and Western
psychology to treat patients addicted to drugs and alcohol, describes it as
“a centuries-old taboo that’s held in the genes.”

Yuri Pionka was concerned about this kind of postmortem fallout as
well. While skinning the tiger in Sobolonye, he had hit a blood vessel that
caused some of the tiger’s blood to spatter on him. He reacted, at the
time, as if he had been burned with hot embers, and he used his knife
blade to scrape the blood off as quickly as possible. “I can say one thing
about the tiger,” said Pionka, “he is definitely a very smart animal. He
has an intellect, and he will go after a specific person who offended him.
My father came back [from upriver] for the New Year and, when he
learned that I’d been involved in hunting a tiger, he said to me, ‘Throw
away the clothes you were wearing, and throw away the knife you used to
skin him.’ ”

That the tiger was physically dead didn’t seem to matter. In the elder

Pionka’s view, this tiger was an Amba, and so may have existed beyond
mortal containment. Whether there was additional cleansing required,
Pionka declined to say. In any case, he suffered a serious illness
afterward that lasted a number of years, but he appears to have recovered.

Trush is a man for whom law and order represent not just a job
description but a personal code of conduct. As a backcountry lawman,
facts and logic—the observable and the provable—form the bedrock of
his thought processes. However, his personal experience, along with his
exposure to native beliefs, has opened his mind to the supernatural
capabilities of the tiger. “I’ve often heard from hunters and villagers that
strange things happen in the presence of a tiger,” he said. “It can be
compared to a snake looking at a rabbit and hypnotizing him: it has some
inexplicable influence on objects and humans and, in his presence,
magical phenomena can occur.”

Trush sees his own survival as all the more extraordinary because of
this, and he considers December 21, 1997, to be his “second birthday.”
For years afterward, members of his squad, including Pionka, would
phone him on the anniversary to acknowledge his survival and rebirth.
“Sometime after all this happened,” said Trush, “I met Andrei Oximenko
[the man who nearly walked into the tiger on the last day], and I said to
him that he was born under a lucky star. He admitted it, and said, ‘Yes, I
heard your truck and turned off the road. Thank you for showing up at the
right time.’ I said, ‘You probably have a guardian angel, just as I do.’

“There was a period after these events when I had unpleasant
sensations if I went to the forest alone, or saw a tiger track,” Trush
explained. “And now, when I see tiger tracks, I still feel fearful and
cautious. I don’t believe anyone who says, ‘I’m not afraid of tigers.’ A
man must have a sense of fear; it’s only normal. Since then, I have
encountered tigers in the forest, but I have never lost self-control. Maybe
more encounters lie ahead, God forbid.”

In 2000, Vladimir Schetinin, Inspection Tiger’s founding chief, was
forced into retirement, and with him went much of his hand-picked staff,
including Trush. Shortly afterward, Trush’s squad mate, Alexander
Gorborukov, committed suicide. Subsequent “reorganizations” at all
levels of government have led to staff and funding cuts that have left the
agency’s future in doubt. In 2008, Sasha Lazurenko was the only member
of the team still affiliated with Inspection Tiger, but since the shake-up in
2000, its power to effectively enforce the law in the forest has been
steadily whittled away, and undermined by allegations of corruption
under the new chief (he was replaced in 2009). Salaries and morale have
diminished accordingly. The current state of things becomes clear after a
visit to their offices. When it was first created, Inspection Tiger was
based in downtown Vladivostok with the State Committee of Ecology;
after 2000, it was banished to the second floor of an obscure housing
project, two bus connections and an hour’s travel away.

“That’s why I left,” said Trush. “That’s why I came to work in a
federal national park. Here, we have the status of state inspectors: I have
the authority to write a report and follow it through. If I catch someone, I
have the authority [as he once had in Inspection Tiger] to push the matter
to the very end.”

Talking to Inspection Tiger’s alumni now is kind of like reminiscing
with a successful rock band or sports team that has broken up and fallen
on hard times. Those years, 1994–2000, were glory days. They had good
training, respectable salaries, high morale, a strong media presence, and
real power. With the necessary equipment—uniforms, vehicles, guns,
cameras, and fuel—to do their job properly, the public respected them,
and so did poachers. They even had a community outreach program
through which they visited schools to talk about their work and the
importance of a healthy, intact environment (Trush continues to do this).
At a time when cynicism and corruption seemed to be the order of the day
in Primorye, Inspection Tiger offered an alternative and, for the most
part, its members took pride in being part of something that was having a
tangible, positive impact on the territory. For many of these men, their
work with Inspection Tiger represents one of the best, most empowered

moments in their lives. The thought of it, and the demise of it, are
bittersweet for Trush, and they elicit strong feelings to this day. But it is
clear that what he and his former colleagues are mourning is not simply
the job, but their youth. “My only regret,” said Trush, “is that I didn’t get
into conservation work ten or fifteen years earlier.”

Now Trush seems to be making up for lost time. In 2007, two new
federal parks were created in Primorye, Zov Tigra (“Call of the Tiger”)
and Udegheyskaya Legenda (“Udeghe Legend”). It is strangely
appropriate that Trush would have been made the deputy director of
Udeghe Legend, and that has been his title since 2008. However, there is
currently no salary for this position and so Trush must rely on Phoenix
Fund, a Vladivostok-based conservation group affiliated with the
Wildlife Alliance in Washington, D.C., which also funds a number of
inspection teams throughout Primorye. The park is medium-sized,
totaling five hundred square miles*; currently, Trush’s duties are focused
on protection and enforcement, the work he loves. In spite of its protected
status, a powerful logging company gained access to the Zov Tigra park
and ransacked it; they attempted this in Udeghe Legend as well, but Trush
intervened. “They thought that if they got caught, they would just pay a
bribe and be done with it,” Trush explained. “But the case received good
coverage in the media. I must admit I was very pleased. Because they
logged in a national park, the fines and damages were five times higher
than usual.”

Trush is an almost relentlessly positive person, and he is exhilarated by
this new challenge. “We are truly starting from scratch,” he said. “There
is nothing there right now, no buildings or anything, and there is still a lot
of lawlessness. We have to do enforcement work in order to create a
place for recreation, civilized fishing and hunting in the indicated areas.
We also have to create an infrastructure; we have to find a team of people
who would be genuinely interested in the job. We have to develop
tourism, create an ecological trail system, create ecological education
programs, etc. It will all happen.”

That said, funding remains a serious concern and tigers are still being

killed. Some things have changed in Primorye, but one thing hasn’t and
that is the hazardous business of dealing with poachers. In November of
2008, Trush was on a raid in the new park when he and his team
confronted a group of Nanai poachers, one of whom fired three shots at
Trush’s squad mate. The shots missed, and Trush chased the shooter
down. He managed to catch him and disarm him, but during the struggle,
Trush was stabbed in the hand. Ultimately, he managed to handcuff the
man, who turned out to be drunk. Shortly afterward, Trush had a heart
attack; in August of 2009, he underwent triple bypass surgery. Trush is
nearly sixty, and this kind of high-stress, high-impact field enforcement
is a young man’s job. If anything, the working environment is only
growing more dangerous, but within weeks of his surgery, Trush was
back on patrol in the taiga. “Nature has decided there should be a tiger
here,” he said. And Trush’s vocation, as he describes it, is to see that it
remains. Summoning a Russian proverb, he added, “Hope dies last.”

* This refers to shotgun shells, which Onofreychuk claimed would put
dogs at risk of getting hit due to the spreading nature of buckshot.
* In 2009, the park’s areas was reduced dramatically.

Epilogue

AS OF 2008, THERE WERE AN ESTIMATED FOUR HUNDRED
AND FIFTY tigers living in Primorye, southern Khabarovsk Territory,
and their adjacent border regions—down from a postwar high of roughly
five hundred in the late 1980s. (By comparison, the state of Texas, a place
that has no natural history of tigers, has more than two thousand of them
living in various forms of captivity.) This may sound like a lot of tigers,
but it is nothing compared to what the wild population was a hundred
years ago. At the beginning of the last century, it is estimated that there
were more than 75,000 tigers living in Asia. Today, you would never
know; within the fragile envelope of a single human memory 95 percent
of those animals have been killed—for sport, for beauty, for medicine,
for money, for territory, and for revenge. Looking at distribution maps of
tigers then and now is like looking at maps of European Jewry before and
after World War II: you simply cannot believe your eyes. It is hard to
imagine such a thing is possible, especially when you consider that tigers
have accompanied our species throughout its entire history on the Asian
continent and have been embraced for their physical, aesthetic, and iconic
power. Because of its beauty, charisma, and mythic resonance, the tiger
has been adopted as a kind of totem animal worldwide. There is no other
creature that functions simultaneously as a poster child for the
conservation movement and as shorthand for power, sex, and danger.
Like a fist, or a cross, the tiger is a symbol we all understand.

Of the eight commonly recognized tiger subspecies, three of them—the
Balinese, the Javan, and the Caspian—have become extinct in the past
two generations, and a fourth, the South China tiger, has not been seen in
the wild since 1990. No reliable tiger sightings have been reported from
the Koreas since 1991. Today, the tiger has been reduced to isolated
pockets of relic populations scattered across the vast territory over which
it once roamed freely. Current estimates indicate a total wild population
of around 3,200 and falling.

Making this situation more upsetting, especially for conservationists,
is the fact that this cascading trend could be reversed tomorrow. Left
alone, with enough cover and prey, there are two things tigers do
exceptionally well: adapt and breed. In nature, versatility equals viability,
and in this, tigers rival human beings. Until around 1940, tigers could be
found almost anywhere on the Asian continent from Hong Kong to Iran
and from Bali to Sakhalin Island—and at any habitable altitude: tigers
have been sighted in Nepal at 13,000 feet, and they are still somewhat
common in the semi-amphibious mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans.
Nor are they terribly choosy: as long as quantities are sufficient, tigers
take their protein where and how they find it. And this is precisely where
the tension lies: Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much
alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly
different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have
prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living
space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous
sense of entitlement to the resources around us. If a tiger can poach on
another’s territory, it probably will, and so, of course, will we. A key
difference, however, is that tigers take only what they need. This is why,
given the choice, many Russian hunters and farmers would rather have
tigers around than wolves. The former are much less prone to surplus
killing.

What is happening to tigers now is analogous to what happened to the
Neanderthals twenty-five thousand years ago, when that durable, proven
species found itself unable to withstand the competitive force and
expansion of Homo sapiens and was backed into a corner of southwestern
Europe. There would have been a point when their numbers, too, began to
visibly shrink, and falter, and finally disappear. There would have been a
last one. Many human tribes have met the same fate since then, and many
more are meeting it now. Today, it occurs not so much by death as by
dilution: through resettlement, religious and economic conversion, and
intermarriage, gradually the skills, stories, and languages fade away.
Needless to say, once sheltered by a roof, carried in a car, and fed from a
can, very few humans willingly return to sleeping on the ground, walking

cross-country, and foraging with hand tools. The same is true of tigers:
once they have been habituated to zoo conditions, there is no going back.
To date, there has been no case of a captive tiger being successfully
introduced, or reintroduced, to the wild. Captivity is a one-way trip.
There is a poignant irony in this because, at one time or another, all of us
have been in the tiger’s situation. The majority of us live how and where
we do because, at some point in the recent past, we were forced out of our
former habitats and ways of living by more aggressive, if not better
adapted, humans. Worth asking here is: Where does this trend ultimately
lead? Is there a better way to honor the fact that we survived?

From a distance, saving wild tigers is an appealing idea, but for many of
the people who live alongside them, these animals might as well be
members of an enemy tribe. Powerful, frightening, and unpredictable,
tigers often represent competition in the quest to meet basic needs,
whether it is for timber, game, farmland, or simply peace of mind. What
exactly do you say to the cell phone-wielding, Toyota-driving dacha
owner when she complains that tigers—tigers!—have eaten all her dogs,
and now she’s afraid to walk in the same woods where she used to pick
mushrooms with her grandmother? What do you say to the farmer whose
cow has just been killed, or to the hunter who believes tigers are scaring
away all the game? These are some of the conversations people are
having in Primorye in the post-perestroika age—along with why a local
masseur is considered a serious candidate for mayor of Vladivostok,
when the former mayor will be caught and sent to prison, why bread costs
twice as much as it did last year, and how it seems like the Chinese are
the only ones willing to work a farm anymore. This is the environment
that people concerned about the future of the Amur tiger must work in.

Meanwhile, across the border in Harbin, the second largest city in
Manchuria, one could find—just months before the 2008 Summer
Olympics—Tibetan street vendors openly selling the paws and penises of

tigers. From where they crouch on the sidewalk, a stone’s throw from the
central train station, it is a thirty-minute bus ride to the Harbin Tiger
Park. Jammed between an army base, a housing estate, and a railroad line,
this euphemistically termed “breeding and rehabilitation center” is one of
a dozen or so privately owned factory farms dressed up as theme parks in
which tigers are kept and bred like so much livestock. The stated goal of
the Harbin Tiger Park is to release these animals into the wild, but one
only needs to see these cats’ ineptitude when presented with a live cow to
understand that this is impossible. There is virtually no doubt that,
eventually, these animals will find their way into the wide variety of folk
remedies still sold by many Chinese apothecaries. Whether or not to
legalize the breeding of tigers for this purpose is a matter of acrimonious
debate. The general feeling among conservationists and those
knowledgeable about the industry is that if it is legitimized, the killing of
tigers will also be legitimized and products made from “wild” (poached)
tigers will become even more highly prized. Furthermore, distinguishing
between farmed and wild tigers would be next to impossible.

The trade in tiger-based products has been officially banned in China
since 1993, but it is lackadaisically enforced, and blatant evidence of this
greets every visitor to the Harbin Tiger Park: in the center of the ticket
lobby stands a huge glass vat filled with “tiger wine.” Immersed in this
transparent liquid like a piece of provocative modern art is the full
skeleton of a tiger, shreds of flesh still hanging from the bone. Around its
feet are strewn more bones from other tigers. Visitors may have some of
this morbid elixir decanted for 1,000 yuan (about $140) per liter. It is in
the presence of things like this that one can better appreciate Far Eastern
Russians’ anxiety and confusion—the feeling that they are perched
precariously on the rim of an alien world.

But as easy and tempting as it is to vilify the trade in tiger-based
products, it has a long and honored history in Asia. As the Plains Indians
were reputed to have used every part of the buffalo, so, in Asia, is there a
use for every part of the tiger. Even the scat was used to treat gastric
ailments, and Korean mandarins especially prized robes made with the
skins of unborn cubs. This may seem repugnant, but in every culture, the

wealthy and, increasingly, the middle class have sought products that are
exotic, precious, and rare, often at great cost to the environment.
Alligator handbags, tropical woods, waterfront property, caviar, and
diamonds are just a few examples of this. In terms of its impact on nature
—and on us—our appetite for oil is infinitely more damaging than our
appetite for tigers.

An unanticipated side effect of our ravenous success is that we have
found ourselves in charge of the tiger’s fate. This is not a burden anyone
consciously chose, but it is ours nonetheless. It is an extraordinary power
for one species to wield over another, and it represents a test of sorts. The
results will be in shortly. In the meantime, the tiger will not survive as an
ornament hung on our conscience. In order to appreciate the true value of
this animal—the necessity of this animal—humans need reference points
that mesh with their own self-interest. Probably the most compelling of
these, beyond the sublime image of a tiger in the wild, is the fact that an
environment inhabited by tigers is, by definition, healthy. If there is
enough land, cover, water, and game to support a keystone species like
this, it implies that all the creatures beneath it are present and accounted
for, and that the ecosystem is intact. In this sense, the tiger represents an
enormous canary in the biological coal mine. Environments in which
tigers have been wiped out are often damaged in other ways as well: the
game is gone and, in many cases, the forests are, too.

A vivid example of what is left behind after the tigers go can be seen
from a train window between the Russian frontier and Beijing. Should a
passenger turn her attention from the seatback instructional video
demonstrating how to make a cell phone lanyard from her own hair, she
would see a landscape in which the Marxist vision of nature has been
fully realized. With the exception of a swathe of forest along the Chinese-
Russian border, what used to be the shuhai—Manchuria’s ocean of trees
—has been largely stripped away. Every square yard of arable land
appears to have been made useful with a vengeance—scraped off, plowed
up, altered in one way or another. There is virtually nothing left in the
way of animal or bird life. A magpie is an event. Every wild thing larger
than a rat appears to have been eaten or poisoned. Stunted scrub oak still

grows in russet waves on crags above the scoured plain, but down below,
as far as the eye can see, spread the works of man.

Beyond the train window, this anthroscape continues southward until
one is about an hour outside Beijing proper. Here the factories start and
one passes into a Turneresque “miasm in brown”—part pollution and part
dust from the encroaching Gobi Desert. China is the putative birthplace
of the tiger and, prior to the advent of communism, Manchuria—the vast
area north and east of Beijing—was a source of prime tiger habitat.
Today, with the exception of a few transients along the Russian border, it
is as barren of tigers as the Gobi. Judging from the highways being built
there now, tigers won’t be back any time soon. A Confucian road sign
proclaims the new status quo: “Car Accidents Are More Ravenous than
Tigers.” But not as ravenous as pollution: in November 2005, a
devastating benzene spill in Jilin City, 120 miles south of Harbin, killed
virtually everything downstream in the Songhua River. The Songhua is a
major tributary of the Amur, and the effects of this catastrophe are still
being felt as far away as the Sea of Japan. This is but one of many such
accidents, and their impacts reach far beyond the country’s borders.

It is safe to say that had Czar Alexander II not annexed Outer
Manchuria a century and a half ago, no wild tigers would remain there
today and Primorye would be as unrecognizable as the neighboring
provinces in China. Were Yuri Yankovsky, Vladimir Arseniev, or Roy
Chapman Andrews to return to Manchuria now, they would be completely
disoriented. And so would a tiger. Primorye and its borderlands now
represent the last hope for tiger-dom in Northeast Asia. Completely cut
off from any other subspecies, the Amur tiger’s nearest wild neighbors
are in Cambodia, two thousand miles away.

Looked at from this perspective, Russia’s conservation efforts have
been a resounding success. The presence and current viability of tigers in
the Russian Far East may have begun as an accident of history, but it has
been maintained by human intention, often at considerable personal risk.
And now it may require more: in October 2009, the international Siberian
Tiger Monitoring Program reported a precipitous drop in tiger sightings
in its sample areas. The decrease—approximately 40 percent below the

averages recorded over the previous decade—has been attributed to
several factors, but chief among them is poaching. Even though the fine
for killing a tiger in Russia is severe—approximately $20,000—the
vicissitudes of Russian law make it nearly impossible to convict tiger
poachers. In order to succeed in court, one must be able to produce a dead
tiger, a suspect, and two witnesses—a hard combination to come by in the
deep forest. Some of the details may differ, but in terms of the collective
impact on Amur tigers, it is the early ’90s all over again.

While Inspection Tiger and its sister agencies have been “reorganized,”
disempowered, and starved for funding over the past decade, the
responsibility for wildlife protection in Primorye has been shifted from
the federal government to the territory. The territorial government has, in
turn, handed this job to the Committee for Hunting Management, which
oversees sixty thousand registered hunters. The results are analogous to
privatization: a job requiring objective oversight has been given to an
entity with conflicting interests. Hunting managers don’t, as a rule, like
tigers very much because a single tiger can kill scores of deer, boar, or
elk in a year, thus depriving hunters of game they feel is rightfully theirs.
Add to this the fact that, since 2000, the number of active wardens in
Primorye has been slashed and slashed again to the point that one warden
may be responsible for overseeing thousands of square miles of forest,
and the new data, though inconclusive, begin to make more sense.

As of this writing (December 2009), fewer than four hundred tigers
may remain in the Russian Far East. Elsewhere in Asia, tiger populations
continue to slip as well. If the tiger is permitted to go extinct in the wild,
it would be the largest carnivore to do so since the American lion
(Panthera leo atrox) died out at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately
ten thousand years ago. The extinction of the American lion happened to
coincide with the dawn of our current era, which some scientists have
taken to calling the Anthropocene. It is characterized by increasingly
dense concentrations of human beings living in permanent settlements on
a landscape that has been progressively altered and degraded in order to
support our steadily growing population.

The difference between the extinctions at the close of the Pleistocene

and the bulk of those taking place today is one of consciousness: this
time, however passively they may occur, they still amount to voluntary
acts. Simply put: we know better. This is not an opinion, or a moral
judgment; it is a fact. And yet, just as the tiger has not evolved to
understand that contact with modern humans and their possessions is
generally fatal, we have failed to grasp the fact that we can no longer
behave like small bands of nomads who simply move on to the next
valley—or oil field, or foreign market—when the current one is
exhausted. It is in this context—the meeting of immediate needs versus
long-term self-preservation—that the inherent similarities, and
limitations, of tiger nature and human nature reveal themselves most
starkly. In the case of the tiger, this is less surprising.

To be fair, ten thousand years is an astonishingly short time for a
species to fundamentally remake its relationship to the systems that keep
it alive. But humans are astonishing, and that is precisely what we have
done: by mass-producing food, energy, material goods, and ourselves, we
have attempted to secede from, and override, the natural order.* Now
with the true costs of this experiment becoming painfully apparent, we
must remake this relationship yet again. In this, the tiger is a bellwether
—one of thousands of similarly vulnerable species, which are, at once,
casualties of our success and symbols of our failure. The current moment
is proof of our struggle to evolve (perhaps “mature” is a better word)
beyond outmoded fears and attitudes, to face the fact that nature is
neither our enemy nor our slave.

So how does one remake this relationship in the Russian Far East—with a
tiger?

One could start by restoring oversight in the form of well-trained and
well-funded agencies like Schetinin’s Inspection Tiger. In addition to
protecting tigers and leopards, these agencies would protect the prey
base, not just for big cats, but for human hunters, too. One might then

propose the creation of jointly managed wildlife preserves on the
Russian-Chinese border. If this was agreed to, one would assemble an
international team to assess forest cover in the border region to see if it
could, given sufficient quantities of prey, support a viable population of
tigers. If this was found to be the case, one would go a step further and
initiate a program to start removing the thousands of snares and other
trapping devices that plague Manchuria’s remaining forests like so many
landmines. A system of protected corridors could then be created,
allowing predators and prey to migrate naturally and safely across the
border as they always have, while increased pressure is brought to bear on
the cross-border tiger trade.

With China engaged as an active participant in the effort to revive one
of its most revered and potent symbols, there would be the opportunity to
move beyond the defensive posture that country has so often taken toward
foreign initiatives and begin to share the wealth of knowledge that
Russians, Indians, Americans, and others have accumulated with regard
to tigers and related matters of wildlife conservation and management. In
order to herald this new era, an international tiger conference could be
convened in a Far Eastern border city, showcasing the Amur tiger and
celebrating the renewed spirit of cooperation between these two
enormous and sometimes tigerish countries. With any luck, this event
might coincide with the Chinese Year of the Tiger, which comes around
every twelve years.

Such scenarios may look like pipe dreams, but, in fact, all of these
things have either recently occurred or are currently in the works. In
2002, the four-hundred-square-mile Hunchun Nature Reserve was created
in China’s Jilin province, adjacent to the North Korean and Russian
borders. Between 2002 and 2007, Chinese volunteers removed thousands
of snares and traps from the Hunchun Reserve. In that same period,
reports of tiger sightings increased by roughly 2,000 percent—from about
five per year to nearly a hundred sightings annually. In 2004, an active
cross-border migration route was discovered on the Ussuri River, and
researchers have concluded that roughly a dozen more tigers are living in
that area. Another viable conduit exists between the Sikhote-Alin and

China’s Wandashan Mountains in Heilongjiang Province, and the
possibilities of a preserve are being explored there as well.

In 2008, Tatyana Aramileva, one of the most competent policy makers
in the region and well-versed in conservation issues, was put in charge of
Primorye’s Committee for Hunting Management. Her appointment
represents the potential for a sea change in wildlife protection across the
region. In June 2009, the Global Tiger Initiative, an international alliance
that includes the Smithsonian Institution, the World Bank, and the World
Wildlife Fund, among others, announced the creation of a generously
funded new program dedicated to training game wardens in the
interdiction of tiger traffickers. In the fall of 2009, China—for the first
time ever—actively solicited the advice and opinions of NGOs on matters
of tiger conservation, the tiger bone trade, and that country’s central role
in the rapid decline of tiger populations across Asia. In October 2009, at
the Khatmandu Global Tiger Workshop, Russia announced that it would
host an international conference on tiger conservation to be held in
Vladivostok in the fall of 2010. Because 2010 is the Chinese Year of the
Tiger, the conservation community has adopted it as a slogan and rallying
cry to draw attention to the critical state of the world’s wild tigers. The
commitments made and the actions taken in this pivotal year will likely
determine whether or not tigers remain viable in the wild.

What these agencies and the millions of private citizens who support
them are ultimately seeking is what Dale Miquelle calls “The
Coexistence Recipe,” an enlightened and multifaceted approach to
mediating the complex, and sometimes conflicting, needs of the humans
and tigers who share a common landscape. This recipe is elusive, costly,
and time-consuming to prepare, but one thing is clear: its active
ingredients are not grief or guilt, but vision and desire. John Goodrich,
the longtime field coordinator for the Siberian Tiger Project, said it best:
“For tigers to exist, we have to want them to exist.”1

Now more than ever.

* The only other warm-blooded creature that rivals us in number is

chickens. After that, you must go to rats and mice to find a comparably
numerous species. In terms of our collective impact on the planet, one
would have to look to asteroids and supervolcanoes in order to find a
comparison.

Acknowledgments

Sine qua non is not usually used in the plural, but in this case, it is the
only way to describe the contributions made by the following people:

Dr. Dmitri Pikunov, director of the Laboratory for the Ecology of
Large Mammals at the Far Eastern Institute of Geography in Primorye, is
the veteran tiger researcher who first documented these tragic and signal
events. I am grateful for his passion, and for his time.

Sasha Snow is the British filmmaker who brought this story to a wider
audience in the form of the multiple award-winning drama-documentary
Conflict Tiger. His vision, generosity, friendship, and enthusiasm
emboldened me to go to Russia, and have nourished me ever since.

Yuri Trush, of course, is the linchpin of this story. His patience,
kindness, and willingness to explain in detail a series of events that are, at
times, almost unbearable to contemplate gave me a life-changing window
into one Russian soul. On a daily basis, Trush manifests the verity that
faith is a physical act. It is my fervent hope that this book reflects that
fact.

Josh Stenberg accompanied me on every step of my journeys through
Manchuria and Primorye. Josh speaks eight languages, including
Mandarin and Russian, and his contributions went far beyond those of an
ordinary translator, at times including those of fixer, minder, cultural
advisor, counselor, and historian. In short, Josh was my Dersu; I can
safely and proudly say that, without him, this book would be a different
and lesser thing, if it had come to be at all.

I am continually amazed by—and grateful for—the generosity of
strangers. The residents of Sobolonye and Yasenovie were welcoming
and helpful in spite of all they have endured. In particular, I wish to thank
Alexander Borisov, Tamara Borisova, Sergei Boyko, Denis Burukhin,
Lida Burukhina, Ludmilla Gvordzik (Baba Liuda), Viktor Isayev, Leonid
Lopatin, Sergei Luzgan, Alexei Markov, Irina Peshkova, Irina and the late
Andrei Onofreychuk, Yevgeny Sakirko, Igor and Tatyana Sedykh,

Anatoly Sukhanov (Kopchony), and Danila Zaitsev.
In Krasny Yar, Vasily and Natalya Dunkai were gracious hosts of

strangers as were their daughter, Olga, and her husband, Lyanka. Thanks
also to Mikhail Dunkai, Nikolai Gorunov, Alexander Konchuga, and
Natalya Pionka.

In Luchegorsk, Yuri Trush’s wife, Lyubov, welcomed and fed us day
after day while putting up with marathon interviews.

A number of current and former rangers, wardens, and inspectors from
various hunting and wildlife protection agencies took the time to share
their memories, opinions, and documents, among them Anatoli
Khobitnov, Alexander Lazurenko, Yuri Pionka, Vladimir Shibnev,
Yevgeny Smirnov, Vitaly Starostin, Anatoli Tarasenko, Yevgeny
Voropaev, and Sergei Zubtsov. I am especially grateful to Vladimir
Ivanovich Schetinin, founding chief of Inspection Tiger, for his
refreshing candor and profound dedication.

There is a distinguished legacy of conservation in Primorye, and the
fact that it has persisted so vigorously, against all odds, is a key reason
there are still tigers and leopards living wild in the Far East. The courage,
determination, and sacrifice of these individuals cannot be overstated
and, collectively, they have given this book a larger purpose beyond mere
storytelling. In particular, I wish to thank Sergei Bereznyuk and his
colleagues at Phoenix Fund, Vasily Solkin of the Far Eastern Institute of
Geography, Sergei Sokolov of the Primorye Institute for Sustainable
Resource Management, Sarah Christie of 21st Century Tiger, Michiel
Hötte of the Tigris Foundation, and John Goodrich of the Wildlife
Conservation Society. I am grateful to Aleksandr Laptev who generously
granted me permission to visit the Lazovski Zapovednik, and to Linda
Kerley, Vasily Khramtsov, and Galina Salkina, who shared their deep
knowledge of that beautiful place. I am equally grateful to Anatoli
Astafyev for granting me permission to visit the Sikhote-Alin
Zapovednik, and to Vladimir Melnikov and Nikolai Rybin for sharing
their extensive knowledge of the Sikhote-Alin tigers. Thanks also to
Viktor Yudin for his time and tigers, and to Yevgeny Suvorov for sharing
his remarkable collection of data on human-tiger conflict in Primorye.

Namfou Rutten and Alex von Kemenade were generous hosts in Beijing,
as was Audrey Perestyuk in Khabarovsk.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dale Miquelle, director of the
Wildlife Conservation Society’s Siberian Tiger Project, whose
generosity, hospitality, and openness to all manner of questions and
requests served as a touchstone and reality check throughout this process.

A portion of the proceeds from this book are being donated to several
organizations working on the front lines of the tiger protection effort in
Primorye:

In addition to supporting Yuri Trush’s work in Udeghe Legend
National Park, Phoenix Fund, www.phoenix.vl.ru, based in Vladivostok,
is currently assisting more than a dozen inspection teams in Primorye.

The Tigris Foundation, www.tigrisfoundation.nl, based in Amsterdam,
and 21st Century Tiger, www.21stCenturyTiger.org, which is affiliated
with the London Zoo, are both supporting the work of inspection teams in
Primorye.

In addition to its ongoing work studying the tigers of the Sikhote-Alin,
the Wildlife Conservation Society, www.wcs.org, is focused on refining
and implementing the all-important “coexistence recipe” in an effort to
meet the needs of the Amur tiger and the humans who share its habitat.

Conservation of tigers and their habitat is not a priority in Moscow, so
foreign funding is crucial to the efforts of these worthy organizations.
Even modest donations are greatly appreciated.

Patricia Polansky, Russian bibliographer at the University of Hawaii’s
Hamilton Library; Nina Semenovna Ivantsova, head of the Regional
Bibliography Section at the Gorky Library in Vladivostok; Cheryl
Hojnowski at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Vladivostok office;
and Michael Zwirn at Wildlife Alliance in Washington, D.C., were
helpful allies in ferreting out obscure source material. In Vancouver,
Peter and Rosa Stenberg provided a great translator and generous
assistance with research materials. Bree Bacon, Mike Bakst, Karin Elliot,
and Roma Sidortsov were generous with their insights into all things
Russian. Walt Cressler and Shelly Rosenblum waded through the
manuscript, offering many helpful comments and suggestions.

A number of experts in various disciplines shared their advice,
research, and encouragement at crucial points along the way, among them
Clark Barrett, Rock Brynner, C. J. Chivers, Donald Clark, Amir
Khisamutdinov, Geoff Mann, Frank Mendel, Lubov Passar, Chris
Schneider, Galina Titorova, Kira Van Deusen, Ed Walsh, and Ron
Ydenburg. The late Valery Georgevich Yankovsky offered a vivid
glimpse of a time and place now all but lost to history.

In addition to being classics in their respective fields, George
Schaller’s The Deer and the Tiger, John Stephan’s The Russian Far East,
and Matt Cartmill’s A View to a Death in the Morning are solid base
camps from which many students have launched their own expeditions
into these fascinating realms. That the authors are generous and
personable is a bonus to those following in their tracks. Some other key
sources were Charles K. Brain’s The Hunters or the Hunted?, Donna Hart
and Robert W. Sussman’s Man the Hunted, David Prynn’s Amur Tiger,
and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s The Tribe of Tiger . For those wanting a
rich and readable one-stop source on everything tiger, I would heartily
recommend The World of the Tiger by Richard Perry (sadly, out of print).

Finally, I want to thank Sonny Mehta, Louise Dennys, and Marty Asher
for their potent enthusiasm, and Stuart Krichevsky for his expert
guidance through the urban forest. I am especially grateful to my editor,
Andrew Miller, whose sharp eye, light touch, and good company kept this
beast from getting out of hand. My deepest gratitude goes always to Nora,
and to our children, whose love makes all things possible.

J.V.
Oaxaca, Mexico
December 17, 2009

A Note on Translation

This is a book about Russians and their tigers, and much of the
information in it comes from Russian sources, including many
interviews. I cannot speak Russian, so with a few exceptions all of these
interviews were conducted by Josh Stenberg and recorded by me during
March 2007 and May 2008. They were transcribed by Igor Levit and Asta
Mott, two court-certified translators whose skill and insight gave me a
much better appreciation for the material. Beyond a handful of common
words, Russian bears virtually no resemblance to English, so literal
translations often read like chimeras of grammar and syntax. Therefore,
of necessity, all the translated quotes in this book have been retooled to
flow in English, I have done this while making every effort to preserve
the sense, mood, and character of the speaker and, where possible, their
slang and idiomatic usage. That said, Russian is a rich, colorful, and
nuanced language, and there is no substitute for the real thing.

Several interviews, specifically those with Sasha Dvornik, the late Ivan
Dunkai, and the late Vladimir Kruglov, were graciously shared by Sasha
Snow and Dale Miquelle. They have enriched this book tremendously. I
also wish to thank Misha Jones for his translations of key Russian texts.
Monica Hong and Si Nae Park supplied valuable assistance with Korean
translations and sources.

Notes

Epigraphs:

1 Arseniev, p. 70.
2 Heaney, tr., Beowulf, lines 2415–16.

Chapter 2

1 Epigraph: Chehkov, p. 41.
2 “The area around these harbors”: Khisamutdinov, pp. 133–34.
3 “There are several kinds”: James, p. 545.
4 “If you stand with us”: Personal communication, March 3, 2007.
5 “Manchurian and Sakhalin-Hokkaido Provinces”: A.L.
Takhtadzhian, ed. Problemy paleobotaniki: sb. nauch. tr. [“Problems
of Paleobotanists: A Collection of Scientific Works”]. Leningrad:
Nauka, Leningr. otd-nie, 1986.
6 “The general appearance of the tiger”: Heptner, p. 98.
7 “Now I felt afraid of nothing”: Arseniev, p. 100.
8 “The prohibition on shooting”: Ibid., p. 335.
9 “My … landmarks had vanished”: Ibid., p. 340.
10 “Arseniev had the good sense not to live to be old”: Ibid., p. viii.
11 the total elapsed time: Khisamutdinov, p. 91.

Chapter 3

1 Epigraph: Jeffers, p. 204.
2 “Terminal Modernism”: Hudgins, p. 150.
3 “So, what brings you to this asshole of the world?”: Personal
communication, May 6, 2008.
4 “Siberian conversation”: Landsdell, Vol. 2, p. 247.

Chapter 5

1 Epigraph: Gogol, p. 226.
2 “Each Siberian would be confronted”: Izvestia, Science section, June
8, 2004, http://www.inauka.ru/english/article47379.html.
3 “Maybe it’s near Iran”: Personal communication, July 12, 2008.
4 “You came here alone?”: Irina Peshkova, March 21, 2007.
5 “absorb no less than one-third”: R. Craig Nation, Black Earth, Red
Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917–1991 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992), p. 267, quoted in Goldstein.

Chapter 6

1 Epigraph: Coxwell, p. 122.
2 200,000 people were imprisoned: Interview with Roy Medvedev on
Ekho Moskvy Radio, March 5, 2003.

Chapter 7

1 Epigraph: From “The Book of Rites”; translation by Josh Stenberg,
2008.
2 Party slogans like “Rob the Robbers!”: Valery G. Yankovsky.
3 “It is precisely now”: Pipes, The Unknown Lenin, pp. 152–54.
4 In 2008, nineteen of the world’s one hundred richest people were
Russians: Luisa Kroll, ed., “The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, March
5, 2008.
5 “There’s no government here”: Personal communication, March 21,
2007.
6 “People don’t live in Sobolonye, they survive”: Vasily Dunkai’s
daughter, Olga, personal communication, March 17, 2007.
7 “The truth of Necessity, therefore, is Freedom”: G. W. F. Hegel,
Logic, The Encyclopœdia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part 1.
Translated by William Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975, p. 220.

Chapter 8

1 “The entire winter life of a solitary tiger”: Kaplanov, 1941.
2 “Its massive body and powerful skeleton system”: Baikov.
3 “must have belonged to an animal that measured 14 feet”: Sowerby,
The Naturalist in Manchuria, Vol. 2, pp. 30–31.
4 tigers have killed approximately a million Asians: Matthiessen, p.
89.
5 “When the majority of people have no means”: Personal
communication, April 6, 2009.
6 “Father’s first two kills were immediately discredited”: Caldwell,
pp. 36–37.
7 “Those who missed”: Neff, April 18, 2007.
8 “Before long we came upon a startling scene”: Taylor, p. 77. In
1907, shortly after the Japanese occupied Korea, the Tiger Hunters
Guild was ordered to disarm. According to Kim Young-Sik, the former
editor of the South Korean Internet journal Koreaweb Weekly , the
guild’s response to this command was to assassinate the magistrate
who issued it and launch a guerrilla war against the invaders. Despite
being hopelessly outnumbered, this band of charismatic patriots, led
by the famous tiger hunter and general Hong Pomdo, carried on a
deadly campaign against the Japanese for more than ten years. Finally,
in the fall of 1920, after a series of particularly savage battles in which
the Japanese suffered heavy casualties, the high command in Tokyo
assembled three armies to crush the independence movement once and
for all. Hong and his allies were forced to take refuge in Manchuria
and Primorye where they found sympathy with the Russians, who had
suffered devastating losses against the Japanese while fighting for
control of Korea and coastal Manchuria in 1904–1905.

With the Kremlin’s support, Hong’s army was able to make cross-
border raids for another decade until the new Soviet leadership,
wishing to normalize relations with Japan, finally forbade them. Not
long afterward, Stalin’s increasingly repressive policies and paranoia

caught up with the Korean rebels and many were forcibly relocated to
Kazakhstan along with the leader of the Tiger Hunters Guild, who
languished there until his death in 1943. A reported side effect of the
Tiger Hunters’ shift to freedom fighting was an increase in the
incidence of tiger attacks in the Korean countryside. However, this
problem—and its cause—was short-lived: the Japanese took the same
approach to tigers that they had to their hunters and, by the time the
Japanese were forced to abandon Korea in 1945, the tiger was
effectively extinct there.

Today, Hong Pomdo is considered a hero in South Korea.
9 Apparently, this is a timeless: Defense Department photo (Marine
Corps) No. A373217: “This was the largest tiger ever killed within the
1st Marine Division TAOR,”
http://www.footnote.com/image/51219707/.
10 “A cornucopia!”: Eric Miller, “The Fifth of April, 1793,” in The
Reservoir (Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions, 2006), p. 23.
11 The Maharaja of Udaipur…(one thousand one hundred fifty only)”:
Schaller, p. 226.
12 “No, the bogatyri have not died out in Russia”: Vsevolod Sysoev,
in Troinin, p. 122.
13 “When I got it it was in a paroxysm of rage”: Sowerby, Vol. 1, p.
69.
14 “There were cases”: Baikov.
15 “the most precipitous peacetime decline”: Pipes, Communism, p.
53, from Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, p. 208.
16 “We cannot expect charity from nature”: Feshbach and Friendly, p.
43.
17 “Let the fragile green breast of Siberia”: Pearce, “All Polluted on
the Eastern Front.”
18 “ ‘universal values’ such as avoiding war”: Keller, p. A1.

Chapter 9

1 “It’s more of a silence”: Sergei Boyko.
2 “it killed nothing”: Schaller and Lowther, p. 329.
3 “that under similar conditions”: Ibid., p. 328.
4 “If among all the members of our primate family”: Ardrey, p. 8.
5 “Never blame the man”: Jeffers, p. 433.
6 “We heard the sound of voices”: Thomas, The Old Way, p. 101.
7 “All of the seven lion groups”: Schaller and Lowther, p. 328, fn.
8 Schaller later speculated that this may have been due: Personal
communication, August 7, 2009.
9 “a web of socially transmitted behaviours”: Thomas, The Tribe of
Tiger, 1994, p. 111.
10 “The lions around here don’t harm people”: Ibid., p. 157.
11 “Beyond our fire”: Ibid., p. 131.

Chapter 10

1 Epigraph: Gogol, p. 128.

Chapter 11

1 Epigraph: Thomas, The Tribe of Tiger, p. 17.
2 “… The male strode slowly”: Strachan, pp. 244–45.
3 “Usually animals shot and wounded”: Heptner, p. 194.
4 “I’d wear different hats”: Personal communication, June 16, 2009.
5 “In January 1941”: Kaplanov.
6 “Once upon a time”: Lopatin, p. 208.
7 “They are semi-savages”: Fraser, pp. 221–22.
8 “Some years ago”: Shreider, pp. 42–44.
9 “It is heavy going”: Chekhov, p. 31.
10 “Sixty-five tigers”: Landsdell, Vol. 2, p. 324.
11 “The Russians were probably”: Correspondence with the author,
May 15, 2008.
12 “God be with you, children!”: Trofimov, p. 209.
13 “All of a sudden”: Rooney, pp. A-1, A-2.
14 “None of us had ever heard of anything”: Personal communication,
July 7, 2009.
15 “Will the tigress leave the area”: Energiya TV, Luchegorsk,
December, 9, 1997.

Chapter 12

1 Epigraph: Fontenrose, p. 254.
2 “like a tiger”: Nikolaevna, p. 163, fn.

Chapter 13

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London:
Blackwell, 1953/2001), p. 190.
2 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to
Sex, Vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 193.
3 Dersa Vzala epigraph: Arseniev, p. 19.
4 “To do so, we must first”: Uexküll, p. 5.
5 “The eyeless tick”: Ibid., p. 7.
6 “These different worlds”: Ibid., p. 6.
7 “we have no means of describing cognitive processes that do not
involve words”: Budiansky, p. 192.
8 “All species have been shaped”: Page, p. 116.
9 anywhere but here principle: Barrett, “Adaptations to Predators and
Prey,” p. 219.
10 “I’ve read a tiger’s not dangerous”: Vladimir Solomatin via
Suvorov.
11 “entirely ordinary occurrences”: Suvorov.
12 “Give me a company of soldiers and I’ll conquer China”: Stephan,
p. 57.
13 “Our clothes, always stiff with blood and sweat”: Martin, p. 158.
14 “Using towels as loin-cloths”: Ibid., p. 157.
15 “My paleolithic soul feels at home here”: Ibid., p. 135.
16 “They were like people you meet”: Ibid., pp. 98–99.
17 “We learnt to recognise”: Ibid., p. 116.
18 “The longer we lived with animals”: Ibid., p. 222.
19 “Animals began to play an increasing part”: Ibid., p. 276.
20 “Perhaps this was the origin”: Ibid.

Chapter 14

1 Epigraph: Budiansky, p. 33.
2 “I hid inside the cavern”: Brain, p. 271.
3 “But whence came the race of man?”: Jeffers, pp. 432–33.
4 “If a man-eater continues to kill and eat people”: Rushby, p. 183.
5 “The baboons were apparently too terrified”: Stevenson-Hamilton, p.
262.
6 “When the lion sees the zebra”: Barrett, “How Do We Understand
the Behavior of Others?,” Slide 28.
7 “The lion wants to chase/bite/kill the zebra”: Ibid., Slide 28.
8 “When the lion catches the zebra”: Ibid., Slide 29.
9 “The lion hurts/kills/eats the zebra”: Ibid., Slide 29.
10 “Jurassic Park syndrome”: Barrett in Grimes; see also Barrett,
“Cognitive Development and the Understanding of Animal Behavior.”
11 “the results herein implicate”: New, p. 16603.
12 “People develop phobias”: Bryner.

Chapter 14

1 Epigraph: Coxwell, p. 114.
2 “It became a bit of a joke”: Anatoly Sukhanov (Kopchony).
3 “Those folks are tougher than nails and hardened from horrors”:
Karin Elliot, personal communication, June 5, 2009.

Chapter 16

1 Epigraph: Van Deusen, p. 176.

Chapter 17

1 Epigraph: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or the Whale (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, 2001),
p. 203.
2 “Optimists study English”: Mike Bakst and Josh Stenberg, personal
communications.
3 “What went wrong”: Stephan, p. 3.

Chapter 18

1 Epigraph: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or the Whale (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, 2001),
p. 389.
2 “as with a razor”: Troinin, p. 117.
3 “you learn to read the writing”: Martin, p. 123.
4 “There is a high demand for artistry here”: Chekhov, p. 41.
5 “Don’t ever assume anything with tigers”: Via Linda Kerley,
personal communication, May 7, 2008.

Chapter 19

1 Epigraph: Peter H. Lee, editor and translator, Poems from Korea
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1974), pp. 128–29.
2 “But when the blast of war blows in our ears”: William Shakespeare,
Henry V, III, 1.

Chapter 22

1 Epigraph: Pushkin, p. 121.

Epilogue

1 “For tigers to exist”: Goodrich, p. 29.

Selected Bibliography

Alexievich, Svetlana. Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War .
Translated by Julia and Robin Whitby. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.

Andrews, Roy C. Ends of the Earth. Garden City, NY: Garden City
Publishing Co., 1929.

Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Aramilev, Ivan. Beyond the Ural Mountains: The Adventures of a
Siberian Hunter. Translated and adapted by Michael Heron. Chicago:
Rand McNally, 1961.

Ardrey, Robert. The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion
Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man. New York: Atheneum,
1976.

Arseniev, V. K. Dersu the Trapper. Translated by Malcolm Burr.
Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1996.

Baikov, N. A. “The Manchurian Tiger.” Harbin: Society for the Study of
the Manchurian Region, 1925. Translated by Alex Shevlakov, 1999.

Barrett, H. Clark. “Adaptations to Predators and Prey,” in The Handbook
of Evolutionary Psychology, David M. Buss, ed. New York: Wiley, 2005,
pp. 200–23.

———. “Cognitive Development and the Understanding of Animal
Behavior,” in Origins of the Social Mind, B. Ellis and D. Bjorklund, eds.
New York: Guilford, 2004, pp. 438–67.

———. “How Do We Understand the Behavior of Others?: The Agency

System” (lecture with PowerPoint presentation), from “Human Cognitive
Adaptations to Predators and Prey” (Ph.D. Diss.: University of California
at Santa Barbara, 1999). UMI Microform number 9986870.

Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine . London: J.
Murray, 1996.

Bloch, Alexia, and Laurel Kendall. Museum at the End of the World:
Encounters in the Russian Far East. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Brain, C. K. The Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African
Cave Taphonomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Bryner, Jeanna. “Modern Humans Retain Caveman’s Survival Instincts.”
LiveScience, posted September 24, 2007,
http://www.livescience.com/health/070924_ancestors_eyes.html.

Brynner, Rock. Empire and Odyssey: The Brynners in Far East Russia
and Beyond. Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2006.

Budiansky, Stephen. If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the
Evolution of Consciousness. New York: Free Press, 1998.

Caldwell, John C. China Coast Family. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953.

Canda, Edward R. “The Korean Tiger: Trickster and Servant of the
Sacred.” Korea Journal (November 1981): 22–38.

Cartmill, Matt. A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature
Through History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Cha, Kai-Ching. “Can the Convention on Biological Diversity Save the
Siberian Tiger?” Environs (Environmental Law and Policy Journal) 24,
nos. 2:3 (2000/2001): 3–28.

Champion, F. W. With a Camera in Tiger-Land . London: Chatto &
Windus, 1927.

Chekhov, Anton. A Journey to Sakhalin. Translated by Brian Reeve.
Cambridge: I. Faulkner, 1993.

Corwin, Julie, et al. “The Looting of Russia.” U.S. News & World Report ,
March 7, 1994.

Coxwell, C. F. Siberian and Other Folk Tales . London: C. W. Daniel,
1925.

Dart, Raymond. “Australopithecus africanus—The Man-ape of South
Africa.” Nature, no. 2884, vol. 115 (February 7, 1925): 195–99.

Davie, Lucille. “Who Killed the Taung Child?” City of Johannesburg:
January 13, 2006, www.southafrica.info/about/science/taung-skull-
130106.htm.

Deer, Bryan. “Nature’s Prey.” Sunday Times Magazine (London), March
9, 1997.

Diment, Galya, and Yuri Slezkine. Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth
of Siberia in Russian Culture. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993.

Doeker-Mach, Gunther, ed. Forgotten Peoples of Siberia. Zurich: Scalo,
1993.

Dunishenko, Y., and A. Kulikov. The Amur Tiger. Khabarovsk: The
Wildlife Foundation, 1999.

Eliot, John L. “Hard Times Put Siberian Tigers Out in the Cold.” National
Geographic 182, no. 4 (October 1992).

Erofeyev, Victor. “Letter from Moscow: Dirty Words.” The New Yorker ,

September 15, 2003.

Feshbach, M., and A. Friendly. Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature
Under Siege. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Fontenrose, Joseph. Orion: The Myth of the Hunter and the Huntress.
University of California Publications in Classical Studies, Vol. 23 (1981):
1–315, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Formosov, A. N. “Pamiati L. G. Kaplanova [“To the Memory of L. G.
Kaplanov”], 1948, reprinted in Okhotnick’I, Vol. 4 (2000): 164–86.

Fraser, John F. The Real Siberia—Together with an Account of a Dash
Through Manchuria. New York: D. Appleton, 1902.

Galster, Steven R., et al. Russia’s Final Roar: Criminal Threats to the
Siberian Tiger and Local Communities. Washington, D.C.: Investigative
Network, 1996.

Glick, Daniel. “Can Russia Save the Endangered Siberian Tiger?”
Newsweek, January 18, 1993, p. 51.

Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls. New York: Vintage, 1997.

Goldstein, Lyle J. “Return to Zhenbao Island: Who Started Shooting and
Why It Matters.” China Quarterly 168 (December 2001): 985–97.

Goodrich, John, et al. “Time for Tigers: Paving the way for tiger
conservation in Russia.” Wildlife Conservation 105, no. 1: (Jan.–Feb.
2002): 22–29.

Gorokhov, G. F. “The Tiger and Other Carnivores.” Okhota i okhotnich’e
khoziaistvo 9 (1973): 16–17.

Grant, Richard. “Siberian Tigers—The Hunted Ones.” The Telegraph